I ♥ NOVELS: Young women develop a genre for the cellular age by Dana Goodyear is a report in The New Yorker on the keitai (cell phone) novel phenomenon in Japan. Fascinating stuff. I doubt I'd be able to read these novels. The subject matter may or may not work for me, but I like complete and more-or-less grammatically correct sentences and no emoticons in my novels (among other things). I remember a friend linking me to the original Densha Otoko thing a long time ago, but I couldn't get through it because it was so choppy.

I've been thinking of reading Koizora just to see how insane it is, because the plot seems more bathetic even than most shoujo manga. (Thankfully or sadly I have little grammatical sensitivity in Japanese)

OH, please read it! I'd love to know what someone who is not the target audience or a researcher thinks about it. I'm not that sensitive to Japanese grammar but it sounds like these novels just slaughter it. I already get irritated when the narrative tries to be too colloquial in the BL novels I read.

ugh. i'm wary enough about reading manga online, with my monitor at its dimmest, and still get paraoid about my eyes' health. and that's manga. with big, and short texts. on a big screen. novel on my phone? probably not for me XD